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A slab of the roof comes down between us, and Atlas drags me up the steps, and we run.

We run up out of the Deep with the steps shaking under our feet and Felix ahead of us with the lamp swinging. The Hollows are full of dust. In the Sepulchre a column goes over behind us, and the floor splits right where Ren just put his foot. In the Reliquary the glass cases are bursting one after another, all those threads and names spilling across the floor, and I don't stop for any of them. The stairs behind the hearth move under us like a ladder someone is shaking.

Brittany is at the top, on her hands and knees on the hearthstones, with blood on her lip and Herbert's jar and my old coat clutched to her chest. Callum grabs her under one arm without slowing down, and she doesn't argue, which tells me how bad it is.

The house is coming apart around us. The foyer floor tilts under our feet, the banister snaps, and the chandelier comes down behind us in a shower of glass. Atlas hits the front door with his shoulder, and we fall out onto the lawn in a heap and keep crawling.

Behind us, Concordia goes down.

It doesn't fall over. It falls in. The whole house drops into the ground the way the water dropped out of the Well, roof and chimneys and all, and the noise goes on and on until there's nothing left but dust and a few broken walls and the front steps, standing on their own in the grass, going up to nothing.

Atlas wraps himself around me in the wet grass and holds on until it stops.

When it stops, my face is still pressed into his neck, and I say it there before I've even opened my eyes.

"I love you."

He told me I'd say it again when he pulled me out, and he pulled me out. His arm tightens around my ribs until it hurts.

"Yeah," he says into my wet hair, and his voice shakes. "Good. I fucking heard you."

Then the quiet settles in, and it's worse than the roaring.

It's dark. Felix's lamp is lying on its side in the grass, its flame shrunk down small and flickering, and Poe is a black shape beside it. In its light I can see where Concordia was: a hole in the lawn full of broken stone, with a cold breath rising out of it that smells like mud and old stone. Brittany is sitting a little way off with Herbert's jar in her lap, staring at it.

I look into the dust anyway, as if Helena might have walked out after us. She didn't. She's down there under all of it, with nothing in her arms.

I reach for my magic.

It's the first thing I do, before I've even sat up, without thinking, like reaching for my phone in the dark. I reach for all four of them the way I have every day since the sphere cracked in my hand my first week at Nyxhaven.

There's nothing there.

I try again, harder, every way Helena taught me in the Down Deep and every way the guys taught me all summer, but every time it's a foot coming down for a stair that isn't there. I can't hear anyone's heartbeat but my own, and the air is only air. Everything I could do has been part of me since that first week, and now there's an empty place where it used to sit.

I reach for the threads instead, my heart pounding.

They're there. All four of them are so thin I can barely find them, as thin as the strands of a spiderweb you only see when the light catches it, but they're there, running out of the middle of my chest to each of the guys. I can feel them, faint and far off—Atlas scared, Ren gone very quiet, Felix and Callum hurting—but their magic is almost gone: no storm, no shadows, no heartbeats, no futures.

But they're holding.

"Atlas." My teeth are chattering so hard the words come out in pieces. "Your storm."

He doesn't answer right away. Keeping one arm around me, he sits up slowly and holds his other hand out into the lamplight, palm up.

A tiny breeze comes off it and stirs the wet hair stuck to my cheek. That's all, a breath, and then it's gone, and the air on the lawn goes still again.

"That's it." His voice sounds wrong, scraped flat. "That's all there fucking is."

Ren has his hand flat on my chest now, over my heart, and his head bent. His face goes blank while he listens.

Finally he lifts his head. "I can hear yours. Just yours. Barely... it's really far away." He doesn't take his hand away. "Where are you, Ev?"

"On the lawn," I tell him. "With you."

"Who else?"

I make myself look before I answer, so I'll know it's true. "Atlas. Felix. Callum. Brittany. Everyone."